respects-switchnpm

respects-switch is a dependency confusion proof-of-concept package published to the public npm registry by the account r0binak and self-labeled "Security research PoC - Dependency Confusion Hunter". It was published at the artificially high version 999.0.0, the canonical floating-version bait used to outrank a private-registry package of the same name so that build pipelines preferring the highest available version resolve and install this public package instead. It belongs to the same r0binak dependency-confusion campaign as carousel-controller-mixin (MAL-2026-5856) and setka-editor (MAL-2026-5859). Packages in this campaign declare both preinstall and postinstall hooks that run callback.js on every npm install; the script collects installer identity and environment data (username, uid/gid, hostname, homedir, cwd, platform, Node version, local network interfaces, and the external IP via api.ipify.org) and probes for CI/cloud credential environment variables (AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, GITHUB_TOKEN, NPM_TOKEN, DOCKER_PASSWORD) plus GitHub Actions context. The collected data is exfiltrated to a hardcoded Discord webhook and via a DNS side-channel (base64-encoded host data prepended as a subdomain and resolved with dns.resolve()) to defeat egress HTTP filtering on CI networks. Regardless of the stated research intent, install-time exfiltration of host data and credential-presence flags is harmful to any pipeline that resolves this name.

[email protected] ships a callback.js that is wired to both preinstall and postinstall lifecycle hooks in package.json, so the code runs automatically on npm install. callback.js collects host identity (username, uid, gid, home directory, hostname, cwd), local and external IP addresses (the latter via https://api.ipify.org), CI provider context, and presence flags for AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, GITHUB_TOKEN, NPM_TOKEN, and DOCKER_PASSWORD environment variables, then POSTs the resulting JSON over plain HTTP to a hardcoded bare-IP endpoint at http://132.243.20.244:8000/api/collect. The 999.0.0 version number and the package's self-description as a dependency-confusion proof-of-concept indicate the package is intended to be resolved by internal builds that mistakenly pull from the public registry, exfiltrating CI/build-host identity and secret-presence reconnaissance to the operator of the C2.

Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.